Being Open, Being Faithful: The Journey of Interreligious Dialogue.

Ely, Peter B.

Being Open, Being Faithful: The Journey of Interreligious Dialogue. By Douglas Pratt. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2014. Pp. xx + 193. $18.

This work gives a helpful overview of the history, problems, progress, and prospects of initiatives in the field of interreligious dialogue taken by Protestant and Roman Catholic churches since the early 20th century. The title of the work names the tension that runs through the successive chapters: being open to other religious traditions and at the same time remaining faithful to one's home tradition. How does one, in other words, take seriously the evangelizing mission of Christian churches and still converse respectfully with non-Christian religious traditions? Pratt makes clear that, though the mainstream churches have made great progress in clarifying the challenge presented in this tension, they have a long road ahead. The book's three parts, "Setting the Scene," "The Church Engages," and "Some Questions and Issues," give a highly nuanced--perhaps at times overly nuanced--overview of ways of conceiving the relations between Christianity and other religions and ways of engaging in dialogue.

P. makes clear that he has a Christian readership in mind. In the first place, then the book provides conditions for the possibility of engagement for Christian readers who might be nervous about such dialogue. Openness to dialogue presumes certain attitudes and excludes others. P. provides a set of useful criteria for a kind of examination of conscience to identify attitudes or ideologies that inhibit or favor dialogue (6-7). "Isolation," "hostility," and "competition" reinforce the basic standpoint of exclusivity, the conviction that only Christianity offers a way to salvation. The ideologies of "partnership" and "integration" open the possibility of a dialogue that respects the value of other traditions while allowing one to remain rooted in one's own. Here P. makes a point crucial to his argument in favor of interreligious dialogue. Learning the "language" of other religions, far from making us forget or devalue our own language, can actually deepen our appreciation of what might be called our mother tongue (7).

A significant strength of the work is P.'s attention to both Protestant and Roman Catholic developments. An Anglican with Methodist roots, P. demonstrates a nicely balanced ecumenism in his approach to interreligious dialogue. A particularly helpful example is the author's exposition of "Models of Dialogue." Beginning with what he calls "a standard fourfold pattern or typology," P. then supplements this standard pattern--the dialogue of life, the dialogue of action, the dialogue of (religious) experience, and the dialogue of (theological) discourse--with World Council of Churches (WCC) and Vatican variations. The Vatican City's status as an independent state allows it to express formal expressions of recognition, participate as host or guest in various interreligious activities, and collaborate in humanitarian efforts.

P. makes an important and challenging addition to the WCC and Vatican models as a way of moving forward in what he calls "Transcendental Dialogue," which "extends and complements the WCC and Vatican models adumbrated above" (83). Such dialogue requires that "each partner in the dialogue be secure and comfortable in his or her grounding identity" (83). From this place of security and comfort the partners can address "the deep and thorny matters of theology and religious ideologies and worldviews as a priority for interfaith engagement rather than, as has so often been the case thus far, leaving such issues aside in favor of a more homogeneous, often praxis-focused agenda" (83). This may be the most original contribution of the whole study and signals a necessary development in interreligious dialogue.

In the third and last part, "Some Questions and Issues," P. explores a biblical basis for interreligious dialogue in which he singles out the ninth (or eighth) commandment, not to bear false witness against our neighbor (112), and the example of Jesus with the woman at the well (113). Misunderstanding other faiths, speaking disparagingly of them, says P., can amount to bearing false witness against them. Jesus's dialogue with the Samaritan woman suggests an openness to the religious other. In the light of this biblical witness, P. suggests we need to be confident in "the God who precedes us, who is there before us" (126). P. has referred earlier to Origen's notion of "seeds of the Word "that are germinating across creation. God is before and ahead of those who go out proclaiming the good news" (95).

There is much that is good and helpful in P's work. His treatment of interreligious prayer based on actual experiments adds some welcome concreteness. A weakness might be an excessive multiplication of divisions and subdivisions of categories and models that can become bewildering. Perhaps a simplification of categories would allow room for some concrete examples from the author's obviously rich experience in the area of interreligious dialogue.

DOI: 10.1177/0040563915620187

Peter B. Ely, S.J.

Seattle University